MSNBC.com buys EveryBlock local-news service

Adrian Holovaty had two years to use a $1.1 million grant from the Knight Foundation to build his online news service, EveryBlock, into the best source for down-to-the-block local news. That grant ended June 30, and now EveryBlock has been swiped up by MSNBC.com in the Redmond-based company’s second-ever acquisition.

EveryBlock is regarded in the news industry as a promising experiment in the realm of “hyperlocal” — or “microlocal,” as Holovaty prefers — news offerings. Users can type in their street address or ZIP code and find nearby news, emergency calls, incident reports, restaurant reviews and other recent information.

EveryBlock doesn’t employ journalists and editors — it uses computers to compile information from public databases and organize it by location.

In a time when news outlets are struggling financially, EveryBlock offers a new service that could be viewed either as a good thing or a bad thing for existing local news outlets. It fills a gap in coverage by making available the raw details of incidents newsrooms might be too stretched to cover, yet further saturates the local advertising market by adding an additional organization.

Charlie Tillinghast, president of MSNBC.com, said EveryBlock and MSNBC.com will continue to work with local news outlets to set up information exchanges to fill out those companies’ news coverage.

“We are not viewing this as a closed system,” he said. “It’s an open system.”

MSNBC.com would not disclose the price or terms of the deal, though Tillinghast said it was a cash transaction. Kara Swisher, of All Things Digital, reported “several million dollars” were exchanged.

Holovaty and his site’s five other employees will remain based in Chicago, managing the same site with the same logo and branding. As required by the Knight Foundation, the site’s code as of June 30 was released as open-source, but subsequent updates haven’t been released, Holovaty said.

Now that EveryBlock is owned by MSNBC.com, it’s safe to assume developments from here on out will not be open-sourced.

The two sites will have “lightweight integration” at first, Tillinghast said. EveryBlock will bring hyperlocal focus to the Web’s most popular national news site, MSNBC.com.

Going forward, he said, the model will be similar to MSNBC.com’s integration with Newsvine, the Seattle-based company MSNBC.com acquired in 2007 – MSNBC.com’s first buyout. Newsvine pulls in news stories and lets users customize the news they want to read online.

Holovaty

“Joining with MSNBC.com gives us the resources to turn EveryBlock from a cool, useful service into something much bigger,” Holovaty said in a statement. “Just wait until you see what we’re cooking up.”

Holovaty, formerly of the Washington Post, founded EveryBlock in 2007 when he won the Knight grant. EveryBlock currently is in Atlanta; Boston; Charlotte, N.C.; Chicago; Dallas; Detroit; Houston; Los Angeles; Miami; New York; Philadelphia; San Francisco; San Jose, Calif.; Seattle and Washington, D.C.

Cory Bergman, director of new product development at MSNBC.com, wrote on his blog that EveryBlock is a good fit for the joint venture between Microsoft and NBC Universal.

“One of our first conversations will be how we can share EveryBlock data with local media partners,” Bergman wrote. “Our plan is not to compete with the local news ecosystem, but identify ways to reinforce it. After all, data complements coverage.”

Bergman also runs Next Door Media, a network of neighborhood news sites in Seattle including MyBallard, QueenAnneView and FremontUniverse. His venture and Holovaty’s are just two of hundreds of hyperlocal experiments in online journalism.

“I think that having more experimentation for news is a good thing. Because we’re continuing means our experiment will continue, and I hope many more experiments will sprout up,” Holovaty said of EveryBlock. “We’ll throw things on the wall and see what sticks, and get it done.”